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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

John C Foster Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...

Today, John C Foster takes it to the toilet. John writes thrillers and dark fiction and lives in New York City with his lady, Linda, and their dog, Coraline. Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing will publish Foster’s first novel, Dead Men, in July, 2015. For more information on Dead Men and his other work, please visit www.johnfosterfiction.com.

The
Porcelain Fortress of Solitude

I’ll tell
you up front, I can’t relax. I can control myself, I can concentrate intensely,
but I’ll be damned if I can just sit back and listen to the wind – I envy
people who can. To slow down my RPMs I have to do something…water the plants in our little New York City roof
garden, take the dog to the park for a run around, work out until I have no
choice but to collapse. I can’t just zen out…except in one place.

My
fortress of solitude.

My chamber
of chill.

The
bathroom. (Oh cut it out, you know it’s the adult version of a tree fort,
especially in the city). But I don’t just abase myself at the holy throne for a
few minutes of wordy release, I…

(Steeling
myself)

I take
baths. No, I don’t light candles and play old John Tesh tapes, I just don’t
have a hot tub at home and the bathtub is the closest thing I’ve got. (Cool
aside, a friend in Greenwich Village has her bathtub in the kitchen – how
awesome would it be to be able to reach the fridge from the tub?) Seriously
though, I run the hot water, lean back into the heat and white noise and read.

Not toilet
books – I mean, we have those too, Calvin
and Hobbes, the Shakespearean Insult
Generator and Great Lies to Tell
Small Kids rest within easy reach. But my rectangular Jacuzzi is for
serious, pickle your toes reading. I tend to have more than one book going at a
time and when I do, I counter program the books against each other with both
bedtime reading and bathtub reading in mind. Right now, I’m waist deep in the
novel Point Hollow by the talented
Rio Youers and the collection of short fiction and poetry Blood Will Have Its Season by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Point Hollow is a new twist on the classic
small town haunted by secrets story, but instead of Hill House, it’s a damned
hill itself, a mountain that the locals call Abraham’s Faith looms over the
town and it demands sacrifices. Blood sacrifices in a cave filled with the
bones of children. This is my immersion story when I know I have time to lay back
with it and follow a guy named Matt as he returns to the site of his childhood
terror and another fella named Oliver who…well, read it and find out.

Small
towns with terrible secrets draw me like a moth to flame. There are many other
small town terrors, but Salem’s Lot
by Stephen King lurks at the top of that particular heap in my dark heart.
Wandering in its own frightening orbit are the Oxrun Station stories of the
great Charles L. Grant. Can today’s writers hit this classic genre with the
same deceptive pacing and inevitability? Will the new story ring in the memory
as do the old?

It’s with
real joy that I picked up Youers’s novel, a contemporary tale that manages the
neat trick of picking up those old time vibrations with a present day voice. If
you like to wander in bad places, Point
Hollow is a great read.

Joe
Pulver…I’m not even sure how to describe his writing except to say that his
voice is singular, unflinching and darkly psychedelic in his ability to replace
traditional structures with his own and drag you, willing or not, into an
altered reality. His prose is compelling and more poetic than most poems and
his poems paint pictures of such vividness with pacing and explosive words they
defy you not to fall into his black-hearted rabbit hole. He’s been compared to
Laird Barron and Lovecraft, but I think he has his own weird and vicious voice.
He’s also a great Jacuzzi jaunt for me because he varies wildly in length. A
story might cover two pages or ten. The man clearly cares only about using the correct
amount of paper to tell the tale with lean completeness. Blood Will Have Its Season knocks me farther out of the park in ten
minutes than most books do in a week.

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Who's That Girl?

I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.